Crypto Space Over The Past Week From March 26 To April 1, 2018

At the end of the week, we resume everything that the crypto community talked about over the past seven days. This week, bitcoin commissions decreased to the lowest level in the last year, Twitter has announced the ban on ICO and tokensale advertise, in Belarus the decree "About development of digital economy" has come into force and Bitfinex exchange has not listed the Venezuelan Petro token.

Top News

On March 25, the bitcoin commissions were record low. The fee for making a transaction in the next block is one satoshi per byte. In addition, the processing of the transaction now takes less than 10 minutes. At the press time, the situation has not changed.

This week Twitter followed Facebook, Google and Snapchat social network and announced the ban on ICO and tokensale advertising. Twitter spokesperson specified that advertising of cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets registered in major stock markets, but in Japan - exchanges regulated by the Financial Services Agency (FSA) will not be banned.

Technologies

This week, Blockstream team released seven different plugins and apps for LightningApps for development of bitcoin network based on Lightning Charge. Lightning Charge — the new system of processing of micropayments from Blockstream within their own realization Lightning Network named C-lightning.

The Lightning Network itself is still at an early stage of development, but the number of active nodes surpass the number of Bitcoin Cash nodes.

IBM finally revealed the details of the partnership with Stellar, and also talked about cooperation with central banks in the direction of the development and introduction of digital assets.

The payment operator Litepay, specializing in litecoin, stops its activity until it finds a buyer. In a blog of the Litecoin Foundation, on March 26, published information that CEO Litepay Kenneth Asare decided to stop all operations in connection with the preparation of the company for sale.

American automaker Ford is consideringconsiders to use cryptocurrency for communication of cars on the road and reduction of traffic. Ford Global Technologies received a patent "Vehicle-to-vehicle cooperation to marshal traffic " on March 27. The published document indicates possible ways to reduce congestion on the road.

One of the largest Russia banks, Gazprombank, plans to conduct pilot cryptocurrencies transactions this year. According to the deputy chairman of the organization Alexander Sobol, while there is no specific format for working with cryptocurrencies. It is not clear whether access to these services will be available to customers or the bank will limit itself to transactions for its own investments.

Mining

Firefox developers are working on methods of countering the miners that are implemented in the sites. Firefox Product Manager Peter Dolansky said that currently Firefox Tracking Protection function already blocks some of the leading cryptographic scripts, but developers are researching the management of individual elements that will allow users to block specific scripts.

The head and co-founder of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, said that the company should increase the production of graphics cards to solve the problem of their shortage due to the growth of the cryptocurrency scale. According to Jensen, the growth of mining made it difficult for gamers to access Nvidia products. At the same time, he noted that miners are still a minority among Nvidia's customers.

In turn, Intel filed a patent for hardware that reduces energy costs for mining. According to a United States Patent Application released on March 29th accelerator proposed by Intel reduces the space used and the power consumption level of hardware for bitcoin mining. In laymen’s terms, Intel’s new hardware would theoretically make Bitcoin mining less energy intensive, and thus more profitable.

In April Monero developers intend to take an emergency software update to make useless high-speed ASIC for the mining its coin. The development strategy aimed against the use of the Antminer X3, recently announced by Bitmain.

Cryptocurrency Exchanges

On March 26, Coinbase announced that it began to support the ERC20 tokens the next months. According to the company, "this step prepares the ground for supporting ERC20 in Coinbase products in the future, although we do not yet announce the support of any specific assets or options." Now Coinbase supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin on its GDAX exchange.

To date, Bittrex is the single US cryptocurrency exchange that actively adds new ICO tokens into its quotes lists. The Exchange states that "it uses a reliable verification procedure to ensure that the tokens listed on the exchange are in accordance with US law and not considered securities." Also this week, cryptocurrency exchange added trading pair between Tether (USDT) and TrueUSD (TUSD), two stable tokens tied to the US dollar.

Bitfinex exchange is planning to leave Hong Kong and settle in Switzerland, and will add additional trading pairs with its euro, the Japanese yen and the British pound to its platform. At the same time, it refused the Venezuelan Petro.

Huobi officially announced the beginning of operating in South Korea. The company has started the trading of 100 digital currencies in 208 markets and also has created fund of protection of investors for compensation of any losses which have occurred not because of users.

KuCoin trading platform delisted all pairs traded with Bitcoin Cash. Its representatives reported on the technical work that began on March 26 at 10:30 Moscow time. According to them, it is a issue of updating, coordinated with customers. On March 30, similar changes took place at another major trading platform, the OKEx exchange: users were warned in advance about the need to cancel orders in all 13 pairs with BCH. The company itself did not comment on the decision, but the crypto currency expert WhalePanda suggested that these trade pairs are simply "no one uses".

Week also hasn't done without skam. The security specialist from the ESET company Loukas Stefanko has found phishing copy of Poloniex, and Binance users found themselves under a phishing scam.

In The World

On March 28, the decree "On the development of the digital economy" signed by President Alexander Lukashenko in late December of last year entered into force in Belarus. Now Belarus has in fact become the first jurisdiction in the world with complex legal regulation of business on the blockchain. In connection with the adoption of the decree, which establishes the status of digital tokens in the accounting system.

Kazakhstan's authorities intend to prohibit cryptocurrencies, the activity of cryptocurrency exchanges and mining. The main threats that prompt the government to take this step are the impossibility of protecting the rights of consumers of digital money, as well as the potential use of cryptocurrency for money laundering and tax evasion.